Haptic Face Aftereffect

Kazumichi Matsumiya

doi:10.1068/i0496sas

Abstract

Face aftereffects (FAEs) are generally thought of as being a visual phenomenon. However, recent studies have shown that people can haptically recognize a face. Here, I report a haptic, rather than visual, FAE. By using three-dimensional facemasks, I found that haptic exploration of the facial expression of the facemask causes a subsequently touched neutral facemask to be perceived as having the opposite facial expression. The results thus suggest that FAEs can also occur in haptic perception of faces.

Highlights

Face adaptation is a powerful paradigm for investigating the neural representations involved in face processing
One measure for such an adaptation is the face aftereffect (FAE), in which adaptation to a visually presented face belonging to a facial category, such as expression and identity, causes a subsequently neutral face to be perceived as belonging to an opposite facial category (Webster et al 2004)
The participants were asked to report on the facial regions that they touched during expression recognition. Their answers indicated that the areas around the eyes–eyebrows and mouth–lips were important for haptic judgment of facial expression

Summary

Introduction

Face adaptation is a powerful paradigm for investigating the neural representations involved in face processing. One measure for such an adaptation is the face aftereffect (FAE), in which adaptation to a visually presented face belonging to a facial category, such as expression and identity, causes a subsequently neutral face to be perceived as belonging to an opposite facial category (Webster et al 2004). Recent studies have shown that people are able to haptically classify facial expressions (eg, Lederman et al 2007), suggesting that face processing is not unique to vision.

Results

Conclusion